As Leading Edge welcomes our newest colleagues, the fantastic team formerly of JPro, I am thinking back to Fall 2008, when I first encountered the history of the organizations that became JPro. 

I was a grad student in NYU’s MPA-MA program in Public & Nonprofit Management and Judaic Studies. (One fellow student: Ilana Aisen, now Chief Community Impact Officer at Leading Edge.) Seeking part-time work, I became a research assistant at the Berman Archive, now at Stanford, then at NYU. (My supervisor: Mordy Walfish, now Leading Edge’s Chief Advancement Officer.) My job was mostly summarizing publications. Today, AI would do it in a fraction of the time! But the state of technology in 2008 helped my Jewish nonprofit education, by exposing me to countless documents from the Jewish nonprofit past — among them, decades of issues of the Journal of Jewish Communal Service. Published under several titles between 1924 and 2013, this was the journal of the succession of organizations that would someday be known as JPro, now part of Leading Edge. (You can still browse this collection.)

Here are three insights I’m reflecting on now from that past experience:

1. Our field has changed a lot in the past century.

I was struck by the dominance of social work in the journal’s pages. Social work training is still one path into our field, but judging from this journal, early in the 20th Century it appeared to be the path. Partly, this relates to the major issues facing the community at the time — meeting the needs of the 1880-1924 influx of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, an economic, social, and cultural shock that took years (generations) to address. Of course, many of the issues facing the Jewish community of the early 20th Century are still part of our field, from fighting antisemitism to addressing poverty and more. But other concerns, technological possibilities, and changes in the surrounding society that we face in today’s field would strike a Jewish communal worker of the 1920s, or even the 1980s, as alien. 

2. Our field can be like a family — sometimes literally.

A sense of “family” at work can be good — closeness, trust — or bad — boundaries can break down between the personal and professional. But for me, in that job, the work/family boundary broke down in a surprisingly literal and delightful way. Assigned to me, randomly among multiple research assistants (but guided to me I can only say by Providence), was an article by my own grandfather, Herman Weinheimer, who was executive director of the Jewish Community Service Society of Buffalo. I later discovered that the journal’s archive had two articles by him (1, 2), and an obituary after his untimely passing when my mother was just a baby. He was an amazing man whom I never got to meet; I have only photos, family stories, and documents — including German documents showing his arrest and incarceration at Dachau in 1938; American immigration documents just weeks later, after he luckily received a U.S. visa and the Nazis (at that early date) were willing to let him emigrate; military documents showing his return to Germany with the U.S. Army. My family knew those documents. But of the last, less dramatic chapter of his life — when he was a Jewish communal professional making life a little better for the Buffalo Jewish community — we had no documentation, until finding these articles. The Jewish communal professional field practically reached out and told me it was my heritage even before I joined it.

3. The Jewish communal field’s history should be more celebrated.

As Leading Edge and JPro unite, I’ve been thinking about the Jewish communal professional identity. It deserves to be stronger. All of us who work in this field (whether Jewish or not) should have a stronger sense that “Jewish communal professional” is an identity (among others) that we embrace and celebrate. Our field is remarkable, and I think one underrated source of pride in our field is its history. The history of Israel advocacy, being still so central, is I think well known enough. But how many Jewish professionals know that it was Jewish Federations that inspired United Way? Or the contributions of all those Jewish social workers to the field of social work as a whole? Do enough people know how influential Jewish philanthropists have been on American affairs of state? Or the saga of the Jewish community’s fight to free Soviet Jewry? Assuredly, for many people in our field the answer is “Yes, of course!” But my sense (anecdotally, not based on data) is that this kind of knowledge and pride could be more widespread.

As Leading Edge, now incorporating JPro and its whole 125+ years of history, works with our partners across the field to explore what the future of the Jewish communal field will look like (and please do join us in May in Baltimore to be part of that conversation!), I hope that our visions for the future will embrace the lessons, legacy, and pride of our shared past.